All Our Names: Dinaw Mengestu

From the MacArthur Award-winning writer, comes a subtle and quietly devastating new novel about love, exile and the fragmentation of lives that straddle countries and histories. All Our Names is a tale of friendship between two young men who come of age during an African revolution and the emotional and physical boundaries that tear them apart--one drawn into peril, the other into the safety of the American Midwest. In this political novel, Mengestu presents a portrait of love and grace, of self-determination, of the names we are given and the names we earn.

Dinaw Mengestu is the award-winning author of two novels,The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and How to Read the Air.He is a graduate of Georgetown University and of Columbia University's M.F.A. program in fiction and the recipient of a 5 Under 35 award from the National Book Foundation and a 20 Under 40 award from The New Yorker. His journalism and fiction have appeared in such publications as Harper's Magazine,Granta, Rolling Stone, The New Yorker, and The Wall Street Journal. He is a recipient of a 2012 MacArthur Foundation genius grant and currently lives in New York City.

Laila Lalami was born and raised in Morocco. She is the author of the short story collection Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, and the novel Secret Son. Her essays and opinion pieces have appeared in Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Nation, the Guardian, the New York Times, and in numerous anthologies. Her work has been translated into ten languages. She is the recipient of a British Council Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship and is currently an associate professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside. Her new novel, The Moor’s Account, will be published in 2014.

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